Bio
Daniel Moore, Born 1954 in Massachusetts, USA
BFA Graphic design, Philadelphia College of Art, 1976
Retired from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 2013, after 30 years
Trivia
I have been a harmonica player for over 50 years. The first band I was in “Hurricane Blues Band” is where the moniker Catfish began. (1997)
Statement
As atoms are the building blocks of all matter so are textures the building blocks of everything visual. This is my journey of discovery in digital photography.
During a career of exacting technical illustration and graphic design I was seeking an outlet for more creative freedom and ambiguity in my work. In 2008 I joined Flickr, an international website for digital artists to share their work. I was inspired by digital photographers who manipulated images and added textures for various effects a concept which hadn’t occurred to me. Besides the joy of working on highly manipulated photo images, I set about creating textures, some derived from photos, some created manually with ink and/or graphite and some created entirely in Adobe Photoshop.
I am inspired by Artists such as Hans Ruedi Giger, Maurits Cornelis Escher, Zdzislaw Beksinski, and Olivier Cardin among others. In 2019 I watched a video of Cardin execute an entire painting. Each mark and stroke was thought out, purposeful, and full of emotion. I was so impressed with his mark making that I attempted to emulate his style digitally. The first effort was a failure. The second effort where I focused strictly on digital mark making was also a failure, but this time I stumbled upon this current technique of using a base texture to create an entire digital painting using the tools in Photoshop. Pieces of a texture are shaped, the shapes are then assembled into a composition which then has to be manually highlighted and shaded all in Photoshop.
It is my opinion that there is no master intelligence that is controlling anything, but instead that each animate or inanimate being/object is the sum of all of its energies the essence if you will. Size, color, happiness, sadness, solidness, liquidness, personal opinion, public opinion, history, beauty, ugliness, habits, and many more characteristics are all energies that may be involved. I wondered what it would look like if the energy was visible, and assumed the energy would appear as textures. Working with these manipulated textures I realized I could begin to see things appear. There was normally no planning on my part to make this happen, but I decided that when something began to appear I would develop it. At that point the piece takes on a life of its own, its own energy, making me simply the spontaneous artistic tool. I am intrigued by this process and very inspired by the results.
The mind always seems to try to see things as familiar to what has been seen before. My artwork gives your brain the opportunity to struggle to do that. Enjoy the struggle.